Abstract

This paper suggests that we rely, as a species, upon both idiosyncratic and obtuse interpretations of reality and that we need to live in radical democracies if we wish to provoke the licensing of declarations and procedures in a way that will sustain us all. It suggests that design is a dynamic and innate human process in which rationality has global and local rigour but not both at the same time, sometimes it is rigorous locally but not globally and sometimes globally but not locally. We set the boundaries but make category errors about mind and culture that are similar in kind. The in between positions of transactional and normative reasoning must not be rigorously rational and this is shown to be obvious when the ambiguity and equivocation in language is understood and accommodated as an essential practice of everyday life and also and essentially as part of the larger symbiotic dynamic homeostasis of the species. Once we understand culture as an attitude and individual action as an identity that can be socialised we can work on the world as a series of socially relevant local paradigms that become global under the rubric of human values and sustainability.